An Engine Disaster but not for long! Last part...

 After a week of being in the workshop in Manchester, our beloved Gardner 2LW was ready for collection, but not before the offending crank damage was revealed!

Apparently, it was a cruel twist of fate that we should suffer a crank failure.  Nothing to do with his (or my for that matter!) thrashing of the motor.  Just one of those things...

In the workshop looking like a new £12,000 Gardner engine!!

Cheesy picture of me (to give scale!) against the huge engine in the hire van on Richard's marathon pick up session from Manchester.  He had set off at 4.30am to avoid the traffic and was back in the yard for 10.30am!

Safely unloaded onto the bank 

Hoisted into the engine room once again and the roof replaced, Richard was ready to get started bringing her back to life.  (He did a cup of tea and a sandwich first)

A short video of the engine now running and Richard tweaking where needed tweaking.  Sound quality is rubbish as (we discovered later) the screen cover on my phone had a flap over the microphone!  But you can just make it out...

A few hours of checking temperature and other techy mechanicy stuff later and we were off!   Bye for now Paul and Viv Barber, thank you for being our saviours in our hour of need (Old Skool boaters proper!) and we'll see you in March for blacking and welding jobs as originally planned!

Turning the tight corner out of Sheetstores yard on the Erewash Canal, we had to go a little way to the winding hole to turn, which would return us past the yard and onto the Trent.

Winding after breasting up

So back we travelled and nearing the lock past the lovely houseboats

Trent lock drops our boats down onto the river which was just in the green, after a period of amber levels.  As you venture out onto the river, the flow takes the boats left, so to aim for the far bank and slacker water is the plan.  On this occasion, we turned right against the flow and had a fairly steady and graceful (I wouldn't go so far as enjoyable, as this river always needs a fair amount of respect!)  plod up to Sawley Cut

Another very quiet video.  A 360 of our plod up towards the lock where we moored up for the night just before the heavens opened......